Publish Open Access
Open Access is about sharing research freely and openly for the benefit of the public, researchers and universities. It is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major Open Access initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature highlight its importance.
Open Access is now a major paradigm for the dissemination of academic research, and has considerably challenged the pay-to-view subscription journal model.
Open Access at Ulster
The University requires its staff to deposit in PURE:
- to the final refereed, corrected, Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) of all peer-reviewed journal articles and conference contributions with an ISSN (publisher’s policy permitting) at the point of acceptance (and no later than 3 months from the date of acceptance);
- to all other forms of research output relative to the discipline and subject to any publishers’ restrictions including but not limited to:
- post publication updates and corrections;
- text, image, video and audio representations of creative works.
The University encourages the deposit of the full text of books or research monographs where this is permitted by the publisher’s OA policy. Where it is not possible to deposit the full text, details of the contents and a link to the document should be provided.
Read more information on Ulster University's Open Access and PURE Policy at Open Access at Ulster which introduces Open Access to research outputs, answer questions about the topic and provides guidance on how to make your research outputs openly accessible.
You don’t have to sacrifice quality or academic freedom to publish openly
There are many high-quality open access journals and there are many publishers who are committed to advancing open access publishing e.g. Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA).
It is important to remember that open publishing is not restricted to these journals.
Ulster has a series of Read and Publish Agreements, which depending on the publisher, allow either unlimited open access or they have a capped number of articles. The Read and Publish agreements are blanket deals with academic publishers and gaining access to these agreements is not restricted to specific funding bodies. They allow Ulster authors to publish open access at no additional cost or at reduced price. To be eligible, the corresponding author of the submitted article must be based at an institution within the transitional agreement. Check the Library webpage Open Access: Publisher Agreements for a list of Publisher Agreements, details of specific journals and instructions on these agreements. All queries on Read and Publish agreements should be sent to the library open-access mailbox: Library-OpenAccess@ulster.ac.uk.
Additionally, Ulster University’s Rights Retention Policy for Scholarly Works enables Ulster academic and research staff to retain ownership rights to the Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) of journal articles and conference proceedings. On the date of publication, AAMs can be made open access in PURE under a CC BY licence, regardless of publisher embargo periods. Guidance and template wording for manuscript submissions are available on the Library Open Access website.
Share a preprint of your article to enable early dissemination of your research.
Ulster University's Open Research and Innovation Statement encourages researchers to actively engage in processes which will enhance transparency, reproducibility, and replicability of their research. This includes a preprint deposit where this is appropriate.
When sharing a preprint, you should use recognised preprint servers. There are several discipline-specific servers, including:
- arXiv (chiefly for physics, mathematics and computer science);
- bioRxiv for biology;
- PsyArXiv for psychology;
- SocArXiv for social sciences.
For an up-to-date list of servers, including submission formats, guidelines, and licenses supported, please see this research preprints server list. If you intend to submit a preprint to a traditional journal, JISC’s Open policy finder should be used to ensure that the intended journal allows preprints. When you submit a preprint, tell the university about it by creating a corresponding metadata record in PURE which contains the DOI of the preprint.
